Current Teaching

Research Interests

After graduating from the University of Minnesota (1965), Lee Horsley came to England as a Fulbright Scholar to do her postgraduate work and has lived here ever since. She has been at the University of Lancaster since 1974 - currently teaching twentieth-century British and American literature and two specialist crime courses. In recent years, she has worked a lot on web development and eLearning, and was an English Subject Centre e-Advocate in 2006-07. She has written (with Graham Mort) about the relationship between virtual learning environments and the pedagogy of English and Creative Writing, and is Director of Web Development in the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research.

Her current research takes in both British and American literature. Over the last fifteen years, she has written two books on literature and politics - Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). More recently, she has writtenThe Noir Thriller, which ranges from pulp thrillers of the 1920s to neo-noir films and cyberpunk (Palgrave, 2001; expanded paperback edition, 2009), andTwentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2005), a study of the main sub-genres of crime fiction from the days of Sherlock Holmes to the present. Work on this project was supported by a Research Leave Award (2003-04) from the AHRB. She is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell,2010).

In collaboration with her daughter, Katharine, she has written articles on contemporary crime fiction and, in Summer 2002, started Crimeculture, a highly successful website devoted to the academic study of crime fiction/film and offering students the chance to share their work in an international forum. The web address is: http://www.crimeculture.com. She is also co-editor and webmaster for http://www.pulporiginals.com , which aims to make some of the best mid-century American crime paperbacks available as e-books.

Lee is keen to supervise students interested in writing undergraduate or postgraduate dissertations on satire, political literature, film noir , thrillers, detective stories, science fiction and other popular genres. She is also jointly supervising several creative writing PhDs.

Chris Dows, 'Towards a Historical, Social and Cultural understanding of Sequential Art - an Examination of Process and Practice', M.Phil/Ph.D., jointly with Dr George Green (Creative Writing), graduating December 2007.